4 comments:

My first package from Stéphane has arrived. I ordered two varieties of Baozhong, a gaiwan and fair cup, and two singing cups. The package arrived with those plus a third singing cup, a sample of bamboo charcoal, and a sample of an oolong.

Tonight I tried the singing cups, which enchanted me from the moment I opened the package. They are more green than they looked in the photos on my monitor, and are exactly the shade I was looking for. My limited knowledge of celadon comes from the Korean and Chinese collections at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and I know that the exact shades I've seen there have never been replicated by modern technology. I've been frustrated in looking at commercially available celadon cups, which tend to be much heavier in material, color, and overall feel than I was expecting. These singing cups are what I thought a modern celadon cup would look like after all my museum ogling.

The cups are beautifully thin, so that my fingers appear in sharp outline when I hold the cup near a lamp, and the perfect size for someone like me who prefers a larger cup but has tiny hands. I drink mostly green teas, which go well with a thin porcelain cup. The shape is easy to hold and drink from.

These cups make everything put in them look better -- water looks like nectar of the gods. Tonight I brewed some of the Lung Ching I have on hand (listed as Dragonwell, Wild Mountain on teasource.com, my local tea shop). This tea liquor varies from pale yellow-brown to pale yellow over the course of the infusions (I generally infuse this leaf or 5 times with the first infusion at 180F), or at least it does the way I make it. (It should be noted that I'm a novice working with greens.) It is hard to describe how the singing cup affects the color of this tea; the simplest way to put it is that the tea as it appears in the singing cup looks exactly like it tastes.

I'd been using western-style porcelain teacups since those were what I had on hand and thinner than any of the Chinese-style cups I'd seen yet. Now that I have the singing cups, my western-style cups may not see much use for a while.

Thank you, Stéphane. Having an expert find the right cups certainly turned out well for me.

Today I'm trying my new gaiwan and fair cup. I've never used a gaiwan before, so this has been a hilariously messy experience. (You should see what the kitchen looks like after I make chocolate-covered strawberries.)

The gaiwan is the perfect size for my daily use; 200 ml would be too large, 100 ml too small. Again, I'm very pleased with the thinness of the porcelain and it's silken finish -- much better than any gaiwan I was able to find locally. I'm particularly pleased with its aspect ratio; this gaiwan is shorter and wider for its volume than others I've seen either locally or online. I like a shorter, wider infusing vessel for the green teas I've been drinking.

The wide gaiwan gives me much better access to the leaves than a pot does, which is very useful for one still in the first stages of developing a feel for the leaves. Now I just need to learn to pour from it without winding up wearing the tea.